Category: Tech news

Figures out today from eMarketer estimate that in the U.S., just under 82 million consumers, or 26% of the population, will access social networks from their phones this year, rising to nearly 117 million by 2014. But if you are a social networking startup that sees that low-penetration figure as an opportunity, be aware that at the moment Facebook has all but cornered the market, and that the market is slowing down. Facebook today accounts for 85% of all mobile social networking activity, and that proportion is only growing: eMarketer projects that Facebook will account 87.4% by 2014 — or four out of every 10 mobile users and nearly two-thirds of smartphone users.

Meanwhile, growth in social network on mobile is slowing right down, from 50% in 2011 to 18% by 2014.

Basing estimates on a variety of survey and traffic data from research firms and regulatory agencies, historical trends, company-specific data, and demographic and socioeconomic factors, eMarketer analysts found that smartphones are completely dominating social networking activity in the U.S. at the moment.

Some 95.5% of all users are checking and updating on their statuses on higher-end devices, it says. In other words, the different efforts we’ve seen from the likes of Twitter and Facebook to make their services friendly to lower-end devices are almost certainly mainly being utilized outside the U.S. Overall, in a separate piece of research, eMarketer notess that 116 million people in the U.S. will own and use a smartphone monthly this year, 43% of them Android devices.

EMarketer projects that by 2014, the percentage of people in the U.S. using social network sites on their phones will remain a minority activity, with 36.2% of users accessing sites (among the mobile population, the number is about 10 percentage points higher, at46.3%) . This shows that while the figure is growing, and indeed needs to be a consideration for companies like Facebook, PC-based access will continue to account for the majority of use in the U.S.

Indeed, eMarketer estimates that the number of Facebook mobile monthly active users this year will be around 70 million people. That works out to less than half of the 186 million MAUs that Facebook reported for June 2012 in the U.S. and Canada (Facebook’s worldwide MAU figure for June 2012 is 955 million).

Although we are still at a relatively young stage in the market, the landgrab for social mobile might at the same time be closing off: eMarketer notes that growth is slowing down by quite a lot in the next few years.

In 2011, it was growing by 50%; this year that will come down to 40%, and by 2014 “the number of mobile social networkers will increase by just 18%” although it does point out that this is “still in the healthy double digits.” It notes that mobile Facebook usage (as it dominates the space) “will have a similar growth trajectory.”

Executives at Smule, the startup that turns mobile devices into musical instruments with apps like Ocarina and Magic Piano, say the company’s apps are about to get social in a big way.

Sharing has always been a key part of Smule’s products, but Prerna Gupta (who joined the company through the acquisition of another music app-maker called Khush, where she was CEO) says Smule hasn’t gone far enough — the cool musical stuff gets built first, then the social layer is “tacked on at the end.” That’s going to change with the company’s new products, she says, starting with Sing, an iPhone app that’s launching today. (Android and iPad versions are coming later.)

The Smule team demonstrated the Sing app for me earlier this week. At a basic level, it’s a karaoke app. Users can choose from a selection of songs, sing into their iPhone mic with the help of some on-screen guidance, then they get scored on their performance. That part is nicely designed and looks fun, but as promised, things get more interesting and innovative is on the social side. Sing users can invite other users to participate, or they can search for songs to join. Once you decided to join, you sing your own version of the song (you can hear everyone else’s performance as you sing, so if you’re particularly ambitious you can tailor your performance to complement theirs), then it’s combined into the existing vocals to create a single group track.

Smule co-founder and CTO Ge Wang says the collaborative features should help with Smule’s broader goal of making music performance more fun and accessible. When someone opens a Smule app, he says they shouldn’t ask themselves, “Am I a musician?” because the answer is usually no. Instead, the goal is to draw people in, then by the time they realize they’re making music, “it’s too late — they’re already having fun.” With Sing, it’s it should be less intimidating to join in an already-created song than it would be to start singing on your own.

I did wonder about what happens if someone joins a song and, either intentionally or unintentionally, ruins it. Wang says the current version of the app doesn’t allow users to remove specific vocal tracks from their songs, but that could be added in the future. He also says that if you’re particularly concerned about protecting your song, you could use “duet” mode, where you’re only inviting one other person to join you.

You can also discover other performances by exploring a globe showing recently uploaded tracks (in fact, the globe is the first thing you see when you open the app), and by following other users, whose updates appear in your newsfeed.

Gupta says we can expect to see a similar emphasis on social in Smule’s future products, which will include both new apps and updates to existing ones, though the exact form the social interaction takes will be “a little different for each thing.”

Wang also looks at social as a way to connect the user experience across all of Smule’s apps. In the future, for example, the company could create a single user profile showing all of your performances in any Smule product. Or users might be able to collaborate across apps, with one person supplying the piano part via Magic Piano while someone else provides the vocals via Sing.

Smule says its apps have now been installed 61 million times, and that they have 15 million monthly active users.

You can download the Sing app here.

The couponing industry is 125 years old, and in that time it hasn’t changed that much. Users are forced to go through a laborious process to save just a bit of money on groceries and other products. Well, Endorse is coming to consumers with a simpler way to get discounts on everyday products, with a set of mobile apps that will allow them to get money back on everyday items like soft drinks, snacks, and toilet paper.

We first wrote about Endorse when it raised $4.25 million from Accel Ventures and SV Angel in January. When it first launched, it was a web-only experience, with users choosing items to buy from Endorse.com and then mailing receipts in to receive credit from their purchases. (!!!) Not long after, it launched iPhone and Android mobile apps in a closed beta test. Now the startup is opening those apps up to anyone who wishes to use them, enabling users to save between 10 percent and 100 percent on purchases.

The apps work like this: You go to a local store and open up the app, and it’ll offer up discounts on various products like soft drinks, snacks, and toilet paper. You purchase the items you want, and after you’ve paid you take a photo of your receipt. Endorse then makes note of the items, and credits your account with whatever discount should be applied. Once the account has reached $25, Endorse will cut you a check — although it’s looking into quicker means of payment, like through PayPal, issuing reloadable debit cards, or automatically crediting the account you paid with.

The whole thing turns the 125-year old coupon industry on its head. For consumers, the app eliminates the need to clip coupons, many of which can only be used in specific stores. They can get discounts on products featured in Endorse, regardless of where they were purchased — whether it be in their ultra supermarket, local corner store, or the gas station’s Qwik-E-Mart while on the road.

For brands, the app provides better targeting and analytics. Consumer brands spend some $5 billion in coupons every year, but only 1 percent of all coupons are actually redeemed, according to Endorse founder and CEO Steven Carpenter. Even worse, once redeemed, the brands have no information about who actually used the coupon.

Instead of spending billions of dollars on mailers and coupons run in the newspaper and having no idea who is using them, Endorse provides brands with detailed data about where purchases were made, and data around who’s made purchases with the discounts. Endorse connects with Facebook, so it can provide aggregate demographics data about its users.

That means it could also better target users with discounts, rather than blinding issuing coupons to the general population. The whole thing creates a better feedback loop between consumers and brands. As a result, it’s already drawing interest from some big consumer brands. Carpenter wouldn’t comment on the companies that it is working with, but a quick glance through the app shows brands from consumer goods companies like PepsiCo and General Mills.

Carpenter incubated the startup as an entrepreneur-in-residence at Accel, after selling Cake financial to Etrade in 2010. Early employees to Endorse come from YouTube and PayPal, and have been building both the back end platform for brands to promote their products, as well as the apps that consumers use.

The company now has 12 employees, and is already generating revenue, as it gets a cut for purchases made thanks to the discounts it offers. While it’s being used mainly for groceries today, Endorse could spread to other product categories as time goes on. That could mean more discounts for consumers, and for brands, it could mean a better way to reach their customers.

The startup world can’t seem to get enough new fashion-focused companies these days (or rather, lots of startup founders have discovered women are a great target audience in the wake of Pinterest’s soaring growth). So here’s another entry to whet your collective social shopping whistles: Boutine.com. Similar in some respects to Polyvore, as it also enables women to browse and create new looks by mix-and-matching items, Boutine’s key difference is that it aims to be the place you buy those items, too.

According to founder Pramod Dabir, he was inspired to try his hand at a fashion startup after years of working in investment banking (yes, really) thanks to a little inspiration from his then fiancee, now wife. She was at Stanford Business School, and was living in a house with six other girls. So he was there, too. That really opened his eyes to how women interacted with fashion. One of the women at the house was more fashionable than the others, he noted, so she would give the others fashion advice. And these women would even make purchasing decisions based on her suggestions. The idea, then, much like with Polyvore, is to try to take that “fashion inspiration” and curation angle to the Internet. Hence, Boutine.

But Boutine isn’t just a social-sharing site centered around fashion. It’s an online store. Sourcing items from a variety of indie designers, over half of whom are international, Boutine organizes and presents the pieces in a drag-and-drop interface where women can create looks using tops, bottoms, dresses, handbags, jewelry and other accessories. Of some 300 signups from designers, Boutine curated the selection down to just 75 designers, with help from a team of experts from the fashion industry. Today, there are around 2,000 individual items on the site, with an average price of $150 per item.

In addition to the mix-and-matching Boutine allows, users can also add their own Instagram photos to their collections (as the outfits or outfit groups are called). This allows them to start with a photo of something they already own, then find other items to match with it. For example, you could find a necklace to complement a date-night dress, or some new jeans to go with a shirt you love. When collections are complete, they can be shared to all the usual places – Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, or even blogs via embed codes or a WordPress plugin.

When a shopper decides to buy, the entire checkout happens on Boutine itself – it’s not an affiliate site, Dabir says. According to the site FAQ, Boutine charges a 20% commission on products sold, and Stylists (that’s you) would receive a 10% commission for putting the look together. Boutine collects the total commission and distributes the appropriate amount to the Boutique Owner, meaning the bloggers, stylists, and fashion enthusiast who are the active participants building collections on the site.

The company has been quietly running in beta for about a month, and while it’s too early to disclose user numbers and traction, the initial engagement times the startup is seeing are promising, says Dabir. “For the registered users, the average time on site has been about 25 minutes,” he says. “And they usually come back to the site about 3 to 4 times a month.”

Boutine is currently bootstrapped with money from friends and family, but it’s in the process of raising seed funding now.

Netflix is making it even easier for kids to bypass channel surfing and search for their favorite shows and characters, with an updated app for the Xbox 360. The latest version of Netflix’s Xbox 360 app, which went live this morning, brings its increasingly popular ‘Just For Kids’ user interface to the gaming console.

Netflix’s Just For Kids UI debuted nearly a year ago, offering its younger users an easier way to find and watch their favorite shows. Unlike Netflix’s usual user interface, which highlights movie box art and descriptions, Just For Kids is character-centric, so that toddlers can navigate what they want to watch based on which popular characters most appeal to them, whether it be Dora The Explorer or Spongebob Squarepants. Since introducing the UI on the web, Netflix has been busy porting it to other devices, such as the Nintendo Wii, PlayStation 3, Apple TV… and now the Xbox.

For the Xbox 360, the updated app is a clear win, as it will mean even more media consumption on the game console. Microsoft seems to be pushing the Xbox more as a media hub than a game console these days, so grabbing the attention of a home’s youngest users is one way to solidify its place in the living room.

That said, the emergence of the interface and increased Netflix viewing from younger viewers might be having an effect on traditional children’s programming channels. Viacom has seen a fall in ratings at its Nickelodeon channels, for instance, which seems to coincide with the broader release of Just For Kids.

There’s an old saw in consumer electronics that goes something like this: if Palm/Google/Samsung/LG/Huawei/RIM wants to compete with Apple, why don’t they hire a bunch of great people, lock them in a room, give them millions of dollars, and make them build a great phone. They can’t come out until they’re done.

Don’t believe this is true? Check out the 132 page document released during the Apple v. Samsung trial that’s making the rounds right now. It proves two things: that the iPhone was top of mind for Samsung designers and engineers and, more important, there was a group of people dedicated to figuring out what it took to make a best-selling phone. Whether they succeeded or not is a matter of debate – the Galaxy line is doing quite well – but the document shows us exactly how Samsung reacted to the iPhone.

The document is exactly what Samsung needed to do in reaction to the iPhone, but many would argue that their efforts were aimed at copying rather than innovating. Samsung is a leader in Android phones for a few primary reasons – this document is one of them – and it made perfect business sense.

CE designers are in the business of making phone after phone. If you’re confused as to why Samsung just doesn’t shut down their assembly line and build a few great phones, it’s because, like content businesses and food service, you make money by making things. Notice I didn’t say selling things. You just need to release them. Of the number released, a percentage will sell, a percentage will be returned, and you can then discount the products and/or recycle them. It’s an endless loop predicated on very basic market variables.

Apple, however, interrupted that loop. They built something that was clearly very popular and was eviscerating phone sales. Nokia didn’t fail because people didn’t like phones anymore. They just didn’t like Nokias. RIM isn’t on the ropes because CEOs have moved away from email. It’s on the ropes because Apple ate their lunch.

The reaction? Well, some phone companies – Palm being the best example – put a bunch of folks into a room and built a phone. They spent a lot of money, pumped out a nice mobile OS, and then ran out of cash. Other companies like Microsoft embarrassed themselves for a little while and then redid their entire operating system from the ground-up, offending die-hards in the process but potentially remaking their business.

Samsung simply saw the competitor and copied it. Motorola used to be winning by making phones that were anti-iPhones. Samsung is winning now by making the iPhone. It’s working for them, and it will continue to work. They have the ability to make millions of units a year and sell the vast majority.

Again, a flat slab of dark glass does not an empire make. Apple didn’t invent the dark-obelisk-like design, they merely took it to its obvious conclusion. Samsung, blindsided by this upstart, did what huge corporations usually do: they yelled at their designers who, in turn, assessed what they were doing wrong and wrote a report on it. This report is living proof that Samsung was and is scared of the iPhone and, more important, they’d do anything to copy it.

How scared was Samsung? I remember a Samsung rep asking me before the launch of the first iPhone what I thought of a non-existent product. I gave him the standard laundry list of rumored specs I had heard over the months before and he, presumably, took them back to his team.

What Samsung ultimately did was take a bunch of people, lock them in a room, and yell at them. The result is the document below. It’s a reaction to perceived failure and it’s essentially a carefully worded mea culpa. As Mic Wright notes in Kernel, the company is a defining force in South Korea and failure of any stripe is not allowed. Does this mean Samsung needs to be singled out for copying the iPhone? No, but it does mean that Samsung tried its damnedest to make things right in its own myopic way.

Influitive has raised $3.75 Million from 11 investors for the company’s customer advocate platform that helps companies generate qualified leads and shorten buying processes.

Founder Mark Organ said  the unusual seed round is illustrative of how the venture capital community is getting more engaged in smaller deals.

“It’s a huge seed round,” Organ said in an interview yesterday. “It could be called a seed preferred round.”

Organ said he raised money on both coasts. He leveraged Angel List. Seed funding came from the likes of venture capital firms such as First Round Capital, Lightspeed Ventures, New Enterprise Associates and Relay Ventures.

Organ has just a wee bit of credibility in the market where Influitive plays. He founded Eloqua, the marketing automation platform that started trading last week on the NASDAQ Exchange.

Influitive’s business model reflects the new world of online customer advocacy that has emerged in the past several years with the rise of the read/write web. Blogs, Facebook, Yelp – they’ve all provided the foundation for individuals to rally around businesses that they believe in.

These people are as much in the business to business community as they are in the consumer world.

With Influitive, clients initially set up an “AdvocateHub,” which serves as a branded portal that advocates visit to learn how they can market the company and help build an ecosystem that drives referrals.

In exchange, advocates receive rewards from the sponsor companies. This may be a bottle of wine or free access to a user conference. The goal is to get the advocates interacting with the company.

The service has a certain degree of gamification involved. Fill out a survey and you get some points. Follow the company on Twitter you get some more points.

Organ said Eloqua did three institutional rounds of investment. With Influitive, the first round is yet to come. 

Venture capitalists are willing to put in a lot less money and not take a board seat. Instead, venture capitalists are sitting in board meetings as observers.

This reflects the realities of the new economy. It takes a lot less money to take a company to scale.Distribution is affordable. VCs have to get in early and build a tiht relationship so they can later do the $50 million round they dream of.

Cindy Padnos is the founder and managing partner at Illuminate Ventures. Her firm invested in Illuminate. She says her firm liks to work with companies that have raised $1 million but are not quite ready for a Series A round.

“I am seeing more entrepreneurs who are doing that,” Padnos said.

The competitors Influitive faces will come from the social CRM space. The challenge will be attracting the right advocates who are doing it for the love of the business more than  the excitement of rewards.

Fluent is shutting down, or so you may have heard. It’s no surprise that a startup has failed – most do. It’s no surprise that an ambitious, bite-off-more-than-you-can-chew startup that went so far as to proclaim it was inventing “the future of email” is shutting down – that’s a hefty order for anyone to fill. And it’s no surprise that a company based in Australia (which to most VC’s may as well be the moon), couldn’t raise enough funding to continue …well, that’s no surprise, but it’s pretty sad.

What may end up being the bigger takeaway here for anyone daring to tackle one of those frighteningly ambitious startup ideas is that they should know that they’re taking on a damned near impossible task. Because if anyone can build a better Gmail, the one that’s best positioned to do so is Gmail itself.

Investors: Fluent Is “Too Ambitious”

That’s what Fluent co-founder Dhanji Prasanna tells me, at least, when I asked him if anyone could ever really take on Gmail. And Fluent’s potential investors agreed. “Many thought getting users to switch from Gmail was too ambitious,” he says. This, even though Fluent wasn’t asking people to actually switch email providers. It was just another way to interact with the service, similar to Sparrow. A new UI.

It also didn’t help that an investor pulled out at the last minute, due to a conflict of interest. “We could have taken the rest of the round and kept on, but then we’d be back at the raising table a lot sooner than we liked,” says Prasanna.

But the fact that Fluent was a new URL, as opposed to an app (like Sparrow), was a sticking point. “In both the literal and metaphorical senses, the muscle memory of `g-m-a-i-l.com` is just too powerful to overcome,” Prasanna told me, when explaining what happened at the startup. “This is not to say you can’t build a popular email service, but what we attempted was an enormous uphill challenge.”

Co-founder Cameron Adams agrees that it’s not something you can take on, if you don’t have the funding in place. “While trying to raise funds, the feedback that we got was that it was a great product and a great team but there was some trepidation at attacking the established email space,” says Adams. “We needed proof of quite large user numbers and growth – something we couldn’t supply with our own money.”

Gmail’s Baseline Is Too High To Beat

Prasanna also feels that the company got too caught up in trying to be a better Gmail, and early user feedback only served to highlight how far Fluent would have to go to beat the baseline Gmail had established. “Gmail is a fantastic service – it is the app I used the most bar none before Fluent,” he says. “For most users it is good enough. And therein lies the problem.”

“We were building feature parity with Gmail, while we should have been building out a can’t-live-without value feature like attachments or search,” he adds,  ”i.e., something people would part with money for.”

Prasanna then recounted a story of meeting the CEO of Zimbra, who told him that he would simply walk out on a client if they were using Gmail – it’s just not worth trying to beat them, he told Prasanna. “There are a hundred little reasons why I think Fluent did things better than Gmail, but for most people Gmail is good enough,” Prasanna says. “And even if someone buys those hundred little reasons, they don’t necessarily add up to a single forcing function to switch.”

Turning Down Acqui-hires & What Comes Next

In any event, he insists that the decision to shut down came long before the Sparrow acquisition by Google. And like Sparrow, they too had “acqui-hire” options presented from “the usual suspects, as well as other red-hot Valley startups.” But the founders wanted to move on to different things that appealed to each of them on a personal level. “Ultimately, the financial motive didn’t rule the day. I like to think we deserve some credit for that,” he says.

The good news is that their dream – that is, one that speaks not to building a Gmail killer, but of building a service that makes sense of your data and helps you discover new things – has not been entirely killed. It will just sit on the back burner for a while, Prasanna says. Or maybe it will be incorporated into new projects in the future, he muses. But none of the founders are working on email-related projects now. Adams is working on a design startup called Canva. Prasanna is joining a stealth mobile apps startup in San Francisco. The third co-founder Jochen Bekmann is keeping his project under wraps for now.

Can anyone kill Gmail? Maybe one day someone will, the founders still believe. But they’re going to need a large runway to do so.

Prasanna will be posting more about his thoughts later today here on his blog. He adds that he doesn’t speak for the whole team.

The $25 million funding and sales deal announced late yesterday between mobile payments startup Square and coffee giant Starbucks is big, but it is only the tip of the iceberg for what the implications will be for Square and for mobile payments in general.

The deal formally covers 7,000 U.S. Starbucks stores, where Starbucks says customers will have “another way to enjoy a quick and seamless payment experience” at the coffee houses, alongside Starbucks’ existing mobile app, which also lets users pay without cards or cash and has seen some 60 million transactions to date.

But however big that already is, the Starbucks deal could mean more.

It potentially gives Square, which has 2 million businesses and individuals using it worldwide, a partner on which to piggy back into international markets. And a big back it is: Starbucks has nearly 20,000 stores worldwide today. Around 12,000 of them are in the U.S. But growth is happening just as much outside the home market as inside it: in Q2 earnings from the end of July Starbucks noted that it had plans to grow that by 1,200 stores in fiscal year 2013: 600 in the U.S., 500 in China and 100 in EMEA.

The “Squarebucks” deal gives rise to questions of what is going to happen with all of the other players in this space. Since Square launched in 2009, a number of companies have cropped up offering similar products to enable card-based payments. In the U.S., among the bigger plays are Sail from Verifone; Here from PayPal; and GoPayment from Intuit.

The connection between those existing and Square is very strong indeed: we heard from one reliable source that in fact PayPal’s development of Here was directly a result of the company wanting to develop a product like Square’s. “The whole ethos at PayPal right now is to bring in as many technologies for processing as possible,” I was told. When PayPal saw what Square was doing, it created Here, and card.io fits in perfectly with this plan.

Over in Europe, there has been a period of free-form growth with none of those U.S. players yet to set up shop. There are several players, but some of the more active include iZettle from Sweden, mPowa in the UK (which had its own, slightly absurd run-in with Square) and PayLeven from the Samwer Brothers. All of these have been developing and promoting their own point-of-sale, card reading mobile accessories, with much promise but still small numbers for roll-outs.

There is still room for consolidation among all of these — either in the form of acquisitions or just falling by the wayside for lack of scale.

But you know what? It may not matter. That’s because this partnership will let Starbucks customers use “Pay with Square”, its mobile app that circumvents the use of cards altogether. That means this partnership catapults Square into a place where its cardless app could get used significantly more than the company’s phone attachment.

As Howard Schultz, the CEO of Starbucks, noted earlier today on CBS, “The consumer is going through a seismic change in which cash is eventually going to be obsolete.”

And given that Pay with Square is software based it could end up linking up with whatever solution finally becomes the de facto hardware standard, whether it involves NFC chips, QR Codes or barcodes, mobile card-reading dongles or something else completely different — or even if it remains focused on cards, which are likely going to remain for a long time to come.

Pay with Square lets the company forge relationships directly with consumers rather than with merchants — and that means that whatever happens under the hood — whether it is about NFC or QR, or even if it decides to lift off the credit card platform to a different kind of financial instrument altogether — that customer relationship will remain, something that could be welcomed by a population that doesn’t really care about which technology does what. Indeed, as Jack Dorsey told Charlie Rose this morning on CBS: “My fascination has always been simplifying complexities.”

As for Square itself, there will almost certainly be more news coming in its wake, since the company notes in the release that the $25 million Starbucks investment is “part of the company’s Series D financing round”. Other backers in the Series D, which in total is reportedly in the $200 million range, include Rizvi Traverse.

And with money, there are likely to be more product/partnership announcements to come. That’s because Square is, like Dorsey’s other company Twitter, very much built in the mold of a modern startup. Although Square has yet to release APIs like its European rival iZettle, there is still an emphasis on ecosystems and linking up with other players in this space to create compelling offers for users. There are so many players in the market right now that you can see already dancing around mobile payments — Groupon, Foursquare, Facebook, Amazon, naming four not yet in the retail space — that Square may be spoiled for choice for partners.

There there is just one small thing left to conquer for Square: actually getting the masses to think of pulling out their phones instead of their wallets to set the wheels in motion.

Not all Wifi connections are created equal. Some are free; others are relatively expensive. Some are fast, and some are painfully slow. But what if you could combine all of your connections into one super-fast, super-reliable connection?

That’s what the Connectify folks — the same ones who are using software to turn your PC into a hotspot — are doing with Dispatch, their new Kickstarter project. The idea is simple (despite the fact that the technology surely is not).

WiFi is everywhere. It’s in the coffee shop, in the airport, and likely in your pocket (in the form of either a 3G/4G hotspot or a tether-friendly smartphone). Yet anywhere outside of your home or work connection, things tend to be a bit slower and less reliable. Connectify Dispatch is a software solution that lets you combine a public WiFi connection (at the airport, for example) with another network (like your 4G hotspot).

This allows you to do things that wouldn’t normally be possible on a slow, crowded, yet free network, while not running up a crazy bill on your expensive hotspot. Dispatch lets you set different priorities for certain networks, so you can set the airport WiFi or an Ethernet connection to “primary,” and your hotspot to “secondary.”

Connectify has already had some incredible success, including funding from IQT and a staggering amount of usage on its WiFi Hotspot app. The company tells us that 233,000 active users have started a Connectify Hotspot connection in the last 24 hours. That’s nearly 10,000 users every hour.

The same type of success is only sure to follow with Dispatch (Kickstarter link).

Dave Girouard, the former president of Google Enterprise, has struck out on his own with a new startup called Upstart, which offers crowdfunding and mentorship tools to help college graduates pursue (in his words) “a more entrepreneurial path.”

Girouard argues that there’s currently a “misallocation of capital in our economy” — the fact that large companies spend lots of money to recruit and hire college graduates, yet given their lack of traditional credit history, the graduates themselves “couldn’t raise $30,000 if their life depended on it.” Usually, of course, their life doesn’t depend on it, but that kind of money could help people pursue their big ambitions and dreams, rather than settling for a corporate job that they’re not that excited about.

With Upstart, people can raise personal funding (the company’s website declares, “The startup is you“) in exchange for a share of their future earnings. After they sign up, students create a profile with their achievements and goals, verify their academic credentials, then identify how much money they want to raise. With that data, Upstart calculates how much of their income they’ll need to share with investors in order to raise that funding. (Girouard notes that some college graduates are going to be better bets to earn more money, so they’ll need to commit a smaller percentage of their income.) Then investors can commit to backing a graduate for an amount of their choice, in increments of $1,000.

The payments are made on a monthly basis, and are verified based on annual tax returns. The maximum amount of your income that you can commit is 7 percent, and you don’t have to pay for years where you make less than $30,000.

Girouard argues that this approach is particularly suited for the entrepreneurial lifestyle, where your income is likely to be “lumpy and inconsistent.” The payment size varies based on how much you’re making, so if you have a lean year, hopefully you don’t have to worry about how you’re going to be able to afford your payment. On the other hand, in the years when that hard work pays off in a big financial reward, your backers will benefit too. And if you become the next Mark Zuckerberg, that doesn’t mean you’re going to be writing insanely large checks to those investors — the payments are capped at a 14.99 percent annual return.

It’s not just about the financial backing, either. The point is to connect students with people who will provide mentorship as well as money — indeed, they’ll be particularly motivated to provide that mentorship thanks to the financial incentive. (Girouard also suggests that as with many early Kickstarter projects, participants will raise a lot of the money from people they already know.) This emphasis on connecting students with mentors is, Girouard says, a big part of what sets Upstart apart from other “income-based repayment” efforts like Thrust Fund.

Another question is whether people really need more incentive to become entrepreneurs — if anything, I’m hearing complaints from investors and entrepreneurs that it’s too easy to start a company nowadays, leading to startups that aren’t driven by big ideas. (That also makes the general recruiting landscape more difficult, which is a big source of those complaints.) Girouard says that may be true in Silicon Valley, where graduates of Stanford and other schools have access to “a lot more options and capital,” but he says the area is just “a very narrow slice of the country.”

Upstart should help fund a much broader range of efforts than just your run-of-the-mill tech startups. For example, Girouard notes that one of the schools participating in the pilot program is the Rhode Island School of Design, where graduates might want to start their own small design shops rather than going to work for someone else. Upstart funding will also be available at Arizona State University, Dartmouth College, University of Michigan, and University of Washington this fall.

The company has raised a $1.75 million seed round of funding from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, NEA, Google Ventures, First Round Capital, Crunchfund, and Dallas Maverick’s owner Mark Cuban.

While the technology to sell content directly to consumers has existed for a while, few seemed to take advantage of it. Then something changed: First there was Louis C.K., selling his one-hour special Live At The Beacon Theatre to fans for just $5, DRM-free and all. Then Aziz Ansari followed suit. So did Jim Gaffigan. In fact, if you’re a big-time comic and not selling comedy specials direct to your fans, you’re probably doing something wrong.

And it’s not just comics — there’s also a growing community of indie filmmakers who are selling movies on their own, forgoing traditional distribution channels. And what about musicians who want to distribute recordings of their performances, or educators whose lectures could be valuable outside the university system? If you’re not a well-known star, there haven’t been a lot of good ways to make your content available to consumers.

Anyway, that’s what Pivotshare is for. The startup provides a self-serve platform that will let anyone — absolutely anyone — upload their audio or video files to the Internet and sell them directly to fans. And to do so, it’s raised one million dollars in Series A financing from new media investor TownsgateMedia.

Up until now, most content creators putting video online tried to recoup the costs through advertising, but that’s not always the best solution. In part, that’s because getting set up was too complicated. But with Pivotshare, creators don’t have to worry about the vagaries of picking an online video platform, paying for a CDN, setting up a payment system, etc. All they have to do is upload a video, set their price, and Pivotshare takes care of the rest.

Even better, there are no upfront costs or recurring monthly fees associated with publishing those videos through Pivotshare. The startup collects a portion of sales, which means that creators only pay Pivotshare when they are actually making revenue through its platform.

Pivotshare isn’t alone in trying to help content creators monetize their content. VHX, which was behind Aziz Ansari’s special, as well as the online distribution of Indie Game: The Movie, recently raised $1.25 million. The difference is that Pivotshare is hoping to go beyond big-name content producers to enable speakers, conference organizers, and other associations to better monetize their video assets. There will likely be even more companies popping up to cash in on this new opportunity as direct-to-consumer media sales continue to take off.

There’s no such thing as bad publicity. A source tells TechCrunch that mainstream news coverage of the temporary suspension of an NBC Olympics coverage tweeter / hater gave Twitter’s signup rate a boost. The same source revealed that the debacle led to internal communication within Twitter, describing the scandal as having a silver lining: “A good thing”.

That Twitter would tattletale on a tweeter and encourage an offended company to file complaint against them has surely shook confidence of its core user base, many of which revel in the service’s free speech. The company has apologized.

Right now Twitter needs user growth to power its ad model and lay a nest egg. So its understandable that user growth in any permutation, no matter the cause, is viewed positively.

The unfolding Guy Adams drama, from suspension to NBC withdrawing its complaint to reinstatement, piggybacked on the Olympics to become a top world news story. Articles about Twitter dominated the tech blogs, but also garnered tons of mentions from mainstream outlets like the USA Today and Huffington Post as well as sports press like Deadspin.

Seems many readers became curious about Twitter and signed up. Without the hubbub they might not have. The infamy could help Twitter build on its 500 million-plus registrations or get people to revisit the 330 million inactive accounts that have been set-up but abandoned over the years.

This months new signups could be hard to distinguish from increases sparked by the Olympics themselves. Coverage of the suspension likely combined with the service’s s heavy involvement in the London games to get people saying  ”alright, I’ll check this Twitter thing out.” Similar spikes are thought to have resulted from mainstream press mentions of Twitter surrounding the 2011 earthquake and tsunami that hit Japan.

Twitter’s ad products have shown a lot of promise. Promoted tweets are getting 1-3% click through rates, even higher on mobile, and insiders told Bloomberg it expects to hit $1 billion in revenue by 2014. That may depend on the Twitter taking flight with average joes — the kind this month’s “negative press” may have brought in.

We’ve also heard rumors that Twitter may be trying to drum up hype before announcing plans to IPO or raise a massive funding round. The $1 billion revenue projection and sources telling the New York Times that Apple was interested in buying a stake in Twitter both could have been purposeful leaks to this end.

The debacle that ensued from booting Guy Adams surely wasn’t manufactured. But what better way to convince the world of Twitter’s importance than one person’s removal making headlines around the globe?

It’s not often that a company decides to postpone the launch of a high-profile hardware product indefinitely just days before it’s expected to ship the first units. But that’s exactly what Google did with the Nexus Q this week. The spherical Nexus Q media streamer wasn’t just Google’s first consumer electronics hardware project that was designed completely in-house, but it was also a key product the company showcased at its I/O developer conference and put into every attendee’s swag bag. Even at I/O, though, it was already clear that Google wasn’t really sure what the Q was supposed to be and maybe that explains why the on-stage demo of the Q, which was supposed to retail for $299, was the single worst demo of I/O.

Not all is lost, though. Google says that it is working on making the Q “even better.” Having used the Q for a bit after I/O and then quickly forgotten about it, I can’t help but think that postponing the launch was the best thing Google could have done. There is a lot to love about the Q, but it was nowhere close to being ready for public consumption.

Stunning Design Can’t Overcome A Lack Of Features

Here’s the problem with the Nexus Q: it’s a stunningly beautiful piece of hardware that’s being let down by the software that’s supposed to control it.

The moment you unbox the Q (at least the version Google gave away at I/O), it’s clear that this is a high-end device and once you plug it in, the glow of the 32 RGB LED lights around its perimeter just confirm that this is not some cheap plasticy consumer electronics device. The fact that there is not standard 3.5 mm headphone jack and just banana plugs, an optical out port and an HDMI connector also tells you that the Q was meant to be used with relatively high-end peripherals as well (it doesn’t have a built-in speaker, by the way). There are no obvious controls on the device itself, but the upper half rotates and functions as the volume control. With its 25W ARM Cortex-A9 CPU the Q also has enough processing power for games and to stream 1080p video.

After you unbox and plug it in, though, it just takes two minutes to realize that Google either put so much emphasis on the hardware, it forgot what that hardware was actually supposed to do, or that the company rushed the software out to have something ready to show at I/O.

Given that the Q doesn’t have any hardware controls to speak of, you must have an Android phone to control it. To get started, you tap your phone against the Q to initialize the download. In my tests, that mostly worked, but it often took a few attempts to get going. The software itself is very barebones. Once installed, you can stream music and videos from the Q to your TV or audio setup and this works well enough. For some reason, though, Google decided that you can’t stream any music or video from your phone the way Apple’s AirPlay allows you to do. Instead, the Q needs to be connected to the Internet and only plays content from YouTube, your Google Music account and the Play store. There’s absolutely no reason for this limitation, but it’s what Google decided to do.

The least was say about the Q’s party mode, which allows everybody with an Android phone to play DJ at your party, the better. The I/O demo of this feature was awkward and using it at a party would be even more so. If you’re looking for some ammunition to claim that Google doesn’t get social, the Nexus Q “party mode” is pretty good example.

That’s all you can do with the Q that Google gave away at I/O and planned to ship to paying customers. For $299, that’s significantly less functionality than what Apple TV offers for $99.

The fact that Google decided to offer free Qs to everybody who pre-ordered one can only mean two things: Google only got so few orders that shipping them out wasn’t going to hurt the company’s bottom line, or Google plans to modify the hardware and not just the software. I doubt Google will make any major changes to the hardware (except for maybe/hopefully adding a standard headphone jack), so I’m going to assume that the Q pre-sales weren’t looking very good before the postponement and the company realized that the only way to salvage his product was to take at least parts of the experience back to the drawing board.

Making The Q Better Is All About The Software

The good thing is, thanks to this postponement, Google has given itself a second chance to get things right. Most importantly, the Q needs to support more apps. If you are going to make a device that is meant to be hooked up to a TV, why not allow streaming from Hulu Plus, Netflix and other services? Why not add built-in support for Picasa, Flickr and other photo-sharing services? Why not add a browser, too, while you are at it? And maybe throw in a few games that use an Android phone as their controller, too, while you are at it. The Q runs Android and Ice Cream Sandwich, after all. With those features, the Nexus Q could compete with Apple TV – especially if Google manages to hit a lower price point with the new version – without cannibalizing Google TV sales (not like there’s much to cannibalize there in the first place given Google TV’s lethargic sales).